206: Michael Phelan On Best Practices For Booking New Meetings In A Programmatic Way

What's poppin' y'all, it's your man James Say What Sales Buckley, and this is your weekly episode of Make It Happen Mondays with your host, John Barrows. Big thanks to our partners, Sales Loft, Gong, Proposify, Vidyard, and Rise. This week, we are speaking to Michael Phelan of GoToMarketPros. The knowledge that Michael has accumulated over the years comes from his ability to ask the right questions. Not questions that are self-serving, but questions that open the door for him to give. Michael and John are going to also dive into the importance of driving meetings and an ever-evolving concept of give-to-get situations. Also, the impact of well-designed processes will have some high points there as well.

This is sure to be an enlightening journey into John and Michael's expertise, so let's sit back and enjoy. Frontline SDRs and AEs are raving about JBSales On Demand. If you've ever wanted to take your sales game to the next level and stand out on your team, this is a way to invest in yourself. Visit us at ondemand.jbarrows.com to subscribe today and start selling better. Let's get our hands dirty with John and Michael. Good afternoon, everybody. This is John Barrows. Make it happen Monday. Hopefully, you had a fantastic weekend. I am here with a very interesting guest, and we have some connective tissues here in a couple of different worlds. One is Staples. One is Boston. And the other is sales and marketing.

So I'd like to introduce to the show Michael Phelan from the principal and founder of GoToMarketPros. How are you, my friend? I'm great, John. Thanks for having me on. Yeah, thanks. So how's Boston? We were talking a little bit beforehand, but how's Boston these days? Well, Boston is suffering a little bit on the sports side and the Super Bowl. But we do have Boston South that we call our new team, which is Tampa with Brady and Brock. So that's what we call Brady. Are you one of those ones who is a hater of Brady because he left, or are you embracing Brady because he's Brady? I am a total embracer. Thank you. All right. Thank you. Because I was going to say, we're going to start off on the wrong foot.

Because I will tell you, any Boston fan right now that talks shit about Brady, I think is an absolute moron. That guy gave us 20 years of just absolute awesomeness. And he's not even the one who said, I want to leave. He wanted to stay. And we booted him out. So I have zero hate for Brady. I hope he wins five more, for crying out loud. Did you see him throwing the trophy across to Gronk? Yeah, I did. If anybody's going to throw the trophy and it's actually going to get across the water, you could trust those two guys. Although, what if somebody went into the water? Oh, that would have been brilliant. That would have been so awesome. I did see, there was another clip, I don't know if you saw it, where he was hammered drunk.

Yeah. Yeah, he was like, some guy was holding him. And Brady doesn't drink. You know, he's a perfectionist as far as what goes into his body. He doesn't, you know, eat strawberries and all that weird stuff. He eats avocado ice cream. And there's that picture of him just stumbling, barely able to walk. I'm like, yeah, Brady finally let go. So good for him. Meanwhile, Gronk probably had four kegs and didn't even kill it. I think Gronk is hammered 24-7. I don't think he stays sober. But anyways, I always say that, you know, the audience, you know, Boston fans talking Boston sports, people tune out pretty fast because they hate it. But let's get into today's talk. Well, let's get talk. Give us some background here, Michael, because I did, you know, I'd love to talk to you about your experience over at Staples because I don't know if you're aware, but my first little company got bought by Staples and I and I I slammed into and I've been listening to some of your podcasts and stuff and I slammed into the corporate world of Staples.

I kind of my joke is that Staples literally invented red tape. And, you know, I went from being one little guy with a stoner marketing guy that we could get a campaign out the next day. You know, I'd whiteboard it out and he'd fire it off to like having to sit down with 47 meetings with 50 people and six months later come out with something. So talk us through your background, but I'd love to kind of get your perspective in those areas. Oh, yeah. No, I have some great Staples stories, too. But, yeah, so my background is I started in sales and kind of with bigger companies and kind of worked my way into sales management, ran some business units, companies like, you know, Polaroid and Reebok and Staples.

And then I kind of got a little bit tired of the big company side of things. You know, I would go to business meetings and I would say they'd present to me marketing plans and I'd say, well, what did you throw in the trash? I would always think that whatever they threw out was better than what they presented, which is interesting. But then I started to work on startup and emerging companies, had a sales, had a marketing, did a lot of work with AT&T and Comcast and Verizon. And about 10 years ago, I formed Go-To-Market Pros. And it was really designed to have a coherent, smart, go-to-market strategy because everybody's an expert in a niche these days. Nobody really kind of sees the big picture in the market.

So I help companies do that both inside the U.S. and outside the U.S. I love it. Yeah. And I think that I think your perspective is interesting coming from, you know, big business, but then working with so many smaller companies to help them and be more nimble with their approach. Because right now, I mean, you know, I do want to dive into some of your research and what you've seen. But I'm real curious these days about kind of post-COVID world and what does this look like? What does sales look like post-COVID? And I think we're I don't think anybody really knows. And so the question is, is do we do we react to the market based on what the clients are looking for? Or do we dictate where things go?

Because why not try something out? So I am curious before we get into the research, like how what do you think sales is going to look like? Sales and marketing alignment and those type of things is going to look like coming out of this. Right. Because I think this is a fundamental shift in a lot of things. And it's accelerated quite a few things that were already on their path. So let's start with that first. Like what do you see post-COVID? What does this look like for us? Yeah, it's interesting. You know, there's certain parts of sales and marketing that haven't changed much because of COVID. You know, your classic, you know, marketing demand engine, lead generation, inside sales. You know, they've been doing that for a while.

They don't really meet face to face with customers. Many of them don't travel. So those people haven't had that much impact. I think the change has been more on the buyer side than on the seller side. But I do work in some more traditional industries like construction and manufacturing. And those people, you know, they're 20 years on the road and they're traveling, you know, hundreds of thousands of miles. Many of them very non-technical at all. In fact, some of them have a technical assistant just to put stuff in the CRM. So those people, I think, are finding it really hard to transition back. High salaries, high travel. They don't want to be stuck in an office. They don't understand the technology.

They don't particularly want to understand the technology. And now you get someone who is, you know, 50 or 55 working for someone who's 23. And, you know, so I think a lot of those people are being being edged out. So I think on the seller side, the inside side hasn't changed. What I've seen on the buyer side, at some level, they have more time than ever, right? Because they're working remotely. So you've got a buyer that's more available at one level. But because they're in a home environment and because they more pull on the home side, you know, they're getting a little bit more choosy about who they talk to and what they talk about. So the good news is if you've got a very relevant story to tell and if you've got insights and you've got knowledge to share, it's easier to get to buyers.

On the other hand, if you don't, it's much, much harder to get to buyers. Because you're not sitting around with someone just doing nothing, waiting for the next meeting to start, right? They don't have as many meetings and their boss, you know, you don't have as many fire drills now in corporations. Because for a fire drill, you need a boss with 20 people called into a conference room. It's harder to do that remotely. So I think it's good and bad, but it's really the outside salespeople that are really going to be hit bad, I think, and permanently. I think that's where the big change is going to be. Yeah, I agree with you. Like, I'm sitting there talking to my team about, like, what does training look like post, you know, post-COVID?

I mean, we've adapted here with, you know, doing everything remotely and we have an online program and everything else. But, I mean, this is really, I really don't think on-site, full-day training is almost ever going to come back. I mean, maybe in some of the more traditional industries, like you said, but, you know, as far as my demographic, which is mostly SaaS, mostly millennials, that type of thing. Like, I don't think the tolerance is even going to be there for somebody to sit in a room for eight hours listening to some idiot like me talk. And when you look at sales, I mean, I'm looking at some of the data that LinkedIn's putting out there and they're doing surveys from buyers, to your point.

Buyers are actually getting used to this and they're liking it. You know what I mean? They're liking the no bullshit. Like, I don't have to spend it. I don't have to have the sales rep show up to my office and then schmooze me and, you know, want to take me out to dinner, like all that crap. Like, I can do 30 minutes. I can end it at 30 minutes and you're in and you're out and see you later. And it's really putting us, I think, to your point, especially the non, I'll say, thought leaders or industry experts or people who have value to bring, right? Because they've been there and they can bring that value that somebody wants to learn about. It's those kids who are trying to get that conversation where the perceived value isn't there that are having a real, real struggle, too.

So it's almost like on both ends. If you're too senior and too outside and don't have any experience in sales, you're kind of screwed right now. But if you're too junior, it's a real dogfight to try to even get somebody to even open up an email or respond to something. Right. So what are some of those kind of middle ground best practices from a research standpoint that you've seen? Because I've looked through, you've got, I think you've got 20, what do you call it? Net new prospect meetings is the focal point, right? And you've analyzed like top 10% of reps and what they do and most of them have a process. So talk me through what, why, first of all, why did you focus on the net new prospects?

And then what have you found that is, that is kind of, I don't want to say surprised you, but been different than what you hear from, you know, predictable revenue and those type of things out there, right? Yeah, yeah, no, good, good, good question. You know, I've always, you know, I've always thought about what's the best intersection between sales and marketing. I mean, account-based marketing has brought people together, but in some ways they're still not focused on ad joint number, right? And the joint number is not really revenue. It's too far down the pike for marketing, right? And it's not MQLs and SQLs, right? Because what's happened is marketing will say, hey, I get 5,000 white paper downloads and they'll give them to sales and sales will not convert any of them to meetings, right?

Why? Because we all download white papers. We don't know what we download and we save them through our drive. We don't even read them. And even if we looked at the title, we can't remember who the sponsor was, right? So unless there's some level of strong interactivity, for me, there's no handoff, right? So I look at it as, you know, a handoff from marketing to sales is something that either creates an online chat with the customer, a phone call with the customer, an interactive email with the customer, or ideally some form of video phone call with the customer, right? So if there's no interaction, if there's no engagement, then there's no lead in my perspective. So why don't we just focus on, you know, what is it that's really driving meetings?

You know, I mean, I think chat's good and email, but what is it that driving meetings is easier for sales to relate to? So the first question I had was, well, who's responsible for driving meetings in an organization? So I interviewed, you know, a lot of CMOs and CROs and, you know, the CMOs go, not me. Of course not. And the CROs go, yeah, meetings are really important, but they have no programmatic approach to driving meetings, right? So while sales and marketing has gotten incredibly sophisticated, there are very few programs designed to drive one thing, which is a meeting. So, so marketing drive programs that drive white paper downloads, but that's not a meeting and marketing don't drive any programs that drive meetings and sales doesn't really either in a systematic way.

So I said, well, sales must be getting meetings. And let me, let me interview the top 1% of sales reps. So, so I went in and, and, and sat down before COVID and I do it after COVID remotely, but with the sales teams. And I said, well, let me, let's go around the room and talk about your last 20 meetings. How did you get them? And, you know, we went around the room and stuff like that. And first off, very, none of it was top-down driven. There was no training on it. They just came up with it themselves. So the first thing is it's really the ingenuity of the individual rep that's getting the meeting. And the second part of it is much of it is, can be turned into programs. So for example, one of the observations I found is, you know, your average sales rep reaches out to a prospect and tells them all they know about that prospect.

Is the prospect interested in knowing stuff they already know? No. What are they interested in? They're interested in the behavior of their best in class peers in terms of solving that problem. So I'll give you a good example. I was talking to Target about advanced marketing personalization for a client. I do these moderated interviews. And I said to Target, I said, well, how many people reach out to you in a week? You know, he said probably 200, 300 people, companies. And I said, how many of them do you meet with? Maybe one, he said, every two weeks or so. And I said, well, why is that? You know, as a buyer, why is that? And he says, well, I asked them three questions. They call me up and say, I want to sell you advanced marketing personalization.

First question I ask him is, well, how well are we doing on that today? Can you give me a constructive assessment? Most of them don't know how to do that. So if they can do that, they say, well, OK, that's interesting. Tell me about my best in class competitor, Sephora, and what they do that's better than me. And that's the second question. The third question is, how are you going to help bridge the gap between where we are and where they are? So the learning from that is that the buyer is much more interested in their competitors than they are in themselves. And sales really doesn't get that. So the top salespeople, typically, they'll interview a competitor. They'll get knowledge from a competitor.

Then they'll go back to that prospect they're trying to sell to and say, had a great conversation with your competitor about advanced marketing personalization. I learned three really new things. I'd love to chat to you about that. And they immediately get the call. So that's an example of something that could be formulaic, right? It could be trained. It could be structured. It could be given by marketing. And it could be turned into a program. Sales is doing it on their own. But that same principle could be applied to all salespeople, the competitive insights. Because when someone walks into the boardroom meeting, like that target guy, when he walks into the board meeting, he's talking about advanced marketing personalization.

Someone in the board is going, well, why aren't we doing as good as Sephora? Sephora, by the way, is ranked as the number one marketing personalization company in the world for retail. So they know that they need to know that. And vendors can add great insights because vendors are talking to the ecosystem. Think about if vendors could start to be more like an analyst in terms of value added, then can I get a demo man? So that's one example. And so I've developed about 20 different approaches to that. And then I've designed programs and executed programs so that you can scale them with customers. I like that. Yeah. And I think one of them you talk a lot about, and it sounds like it falls in line, is the whole give to get, right?

And that we talk a lot about that when it comes to negotiations and reciprocity and all that other stuff where you have something of value. You give it away without really the intention of getting, you know, without the, I can't stand programs. And I do want to talk to you about this one a little bit about that, that give away things with the perception of, oh, I just want to do this good thing. But really, at the end of the day, I'm trying to, I'm trying to get that meeting with you. I'm trying to sell you something, right? So like the genuine give without the expectation of the get is where it tends to actually get much more. But the bait and switch as far as look at this cool thing. And then it's like, oh, crap, you know, this is a sales call.

So, so are, are all your programs revolve around that give, get mentality of that, that, that, that kind of that part of it? Is that a core function of it? Yeah, I get a gift to get is, is, is, is interesting. And there's about, there are about three or four methodologies that tie into that. And you're right in terms of it not being too self-serving. You know, so I do, I do what's called a moderated prospect interview for my clients. So, you know, I'll reach out as an independent research person doing a best practices study. I'll give a stipend to, to, I was just actually on, on such a call with someone from, from Carbonite. And I'll give a stipend to them to participate. And I'll bring my client in as a sponsor of the study.

And in the first, the first 15 minutes, I'll say, well, tell me about how you manage this process today. You know, what are the gaps? What do you like? What do you not like? Tell me about your vendors and so forth and so on. So I'll go through all that. What would you like to have if you could ideally define it? Who's best in class and why? The salesperson who's really positioned as the sponsor of the study and has taken a higher level role in this call will then come back and say, you know, it's interesting that you mentioned you had this challenge. We had this similar challenge with another company. This is how we dealt with it. And this is the results we get. Is that meaningful to you? And so you kind of have that value-added giving conversation.

And in the end of the day, sometimes the buyer goes, well, I want to know more about this. Or sometimes they'll deep dive. But you're nearly requesting them to sell, right? You want to say, hey, you know. And then we come back and we package up all the insights and give them back to them. And then a lot of times they'll introduce us to our company and so forth. So we're talking to people just like them. We're helping them solve the problems. And we're presenting it back to them. So that's a kind of a methodology called magnet marketing, which is a give to get. They get a research stipend. Many of them actually don't take the research stipend. So I give it to a food bank. So they kind of like that, $100 per local food bank.

And, you know, they like to have a quality discussion about what are the strategies to solve this problem? What are best in class? What are some of the obstacles first before you get to whose technology is best, right? And so that's one give to get methodology. Another interesting one is done by a company in Boston you may know called Rapid7. And they're very, very successful. But Rapid7 every year does a Veterans Day program. And it started with, like, they have some veterans who are senior managers there. And they wanted to give to veterans. But what companies don't realize is you let your salespeople do the giving. Why just send a check for a million dollars to veterans? Why not have your hundred reps give out $10,000, $15,000 each, right?

And so what they do is they look at their customers and their prospects, find out all the veterans that are relevant to their function. So if they're selling into IT, they find out and they just reach out to them and say, hey, we have this Veterans Day program we want to individually give to our customers and our prospects. And, you know, we'd like to give to you, you know, jump on a call with us and so forth and let us know who you wanted to go to. First off, they're so delighted. They say, hey, thanks for being a veteran. And there's a connection. Who in your company? There's a little bit of chat about that. And even if it's only $50, it's really they really are proud of the fact that they're generating money and that your company is generating money as the reps are.

And invariably it goes, well, tell me a little bit about you guys. Well, this is what we do. We're not here to sell, but, well, that's kind of interesting. Why don't you talk to Joe? He's just got a new job. He's looking at that. I'll make an introduction, right? So it is a give to get, but invariably the get comes by doing kind of – so there's another variant of that that you go to a big show like CES and you say, you know, we'll give $500 to your favorite charity if you review our new product for us. So not we'll sell it to you, but we want to hear what you think about it and so forth. So you're selling for a – so they come in. You say, this is what it does. Let me show you the whole thing.

What do you think? You do kind of a survey with them. And then whatever charity they want to give to, you give, you know, whatever. And that's packed out some suites of people that, you know, if you look at someone's profile, invariably someone has a charity associated with them. So you're giving first and asking for some feedback on your product can open up a lot of doors. So those are some of the different ones. And this is much better than sending a, you know, swag. I mean, boxes of swag, box – there's all these companies doing this stuff and it's like – it's crazy. I talked to one CIO and he said to me the other day how he hated these boxes of stuff because at one point, it was during a snowstorm up in New England.

He gets a call from the warehouse that some boxes arrived and he's got to go four buildings down to get it because the admin's out. So he's covered in snow. So he's frozen solid. He comes back to his office. He opens up the box and it explodes in confetti, right? Oh, my God. All over his office and there's all this party stuff, right? And there's balloons – not balloons, but all kinds of party stuff. And in walks the CEO and looks around and goes, I'm glad you're having a party at my expense and walks out. Oh, ouch. And then he's down on the ground trying to clean up all this stuff and the box, you know, there's nothing of value, right? So the thing is there's a lot of, you know, a lot of wasted money, you know, and it's – So much wasted money.

It's not personal. The other one which is amazing is sports. There's a – you want to have an emotional connection to the buyer. So what a lot of these guys are doing is they're making a sports connections with the buyer, right? So they're going into their profile and say, for example, if you went to, you know, pick any college you want, they'll go and they'll find a little snippet. Maybe the guy was on the basketball team. And they'll go and find a little video snippet of a game this week where there's a great shot of play. And they'll send it to them and they'll say, hey, I see you went to such and such. I'm a huge fan of basketball. Thought you'd love this little clip. And just leave it at that.

And invariably they go, wow, what a great shot that was. Oh, my God, this brings me back. Or they'll go and give a college shirt. They'll go and, like, you know, have an actual college to his Catholic church and send it to him. So don't send junk and, you know, trash and trinkets. Send something that makes an emotional connection to the buyer. And college is a way of doing that. And sports is a way of doing that. Incidentally, guys are very good at leveraging sports. And women are not. And I don't know really why that is because women play sports and follow sports and so forth. But it does tend to be that that tends to be one of those things that guys tend to do more than women in sales is leverage sports to make a personal connection.

All right, y'all. Michael's got some real winners. I mean, marketing and sales working together more closely to benefit the prospect? Who knew, right? Hey, listen. The things that we're talking about in this episode are unique on purpose. Michael's views are different from most. And all the suggestions and the tactical takeaways that you're getting from him and John are all based on the experiences that they've had firsthand. This is really getting good. I want to hear your stories. Did you win a deal recently that you're proud of or get a meeting that it's taken you months to earn? Send me that story at james at jbarrows.com to be featured on next week's episode. Today, we're highlighting Ben Miller, who increased his meeting results by 15% with the skills that he gained from filling the funnel inside of JB Sales On Demand.

He's also begun using video in his prospecting and seeing reply rates and meetings go up and to the right as he works to perfect this craft. Stay the course, Ben. We got you. Have you upped your reply rates lately? Impact your customers more often and generally do a better job relating to them and step up your game by joining JB Sales On Demand. With courses from prospecting to closing and personal branding, you can't go wrong investing in your own success with JB Sales On Demand. Visit us at ondemand.jbarrows.com to subscribe today and start selling better. Let's get back into the studio. Yeah, and I agree. And, well, the relevance of it needs to be important, too. So, for instance, when you're doing your research, right, I kind of always say, look, just because I went to the University of Maryland and you figure that out does not buy you any points, right?

Because, for me, Maryland was, you know, at this point, 25 years ago. I don't talk about University of Maryland. I don't post about University of Maryland. I don't give a shit about, you know, I mean, I do, but I don't. So, actually, you hurt yourself right now. But if I'm posting about, hey, you know, like, you know, like for me, the easy one is, you know, Tom Brady and the Patriots, right? Because I'm constantly putting that on Instagram. I'm constantly saying, yep, go, Brady, you know, that type of thing. And so you can easily say it's relevant and it's timely, right? But the fear is because I actually think these days you actually lose credibility in a lot of ways if you swing and miss, right?

So if you make an assumption about somebody that you throw something out there, and I'll go back to schwag, I actually personally, you lose credibility with me when you send me schwag. Like, and it's for a very specific reason, it's because my wife's an environmentalist, I'm an environmentalist, you know, because of this. And I just look at waste. I just look at waste. And I'm like, this is another t-shirt that's going to go in a landfill that or I'm going to have to donate and I'm after going to go out of my way to now donate this to somebody who could actually use it because I don't want it. So now all of a sudden you've given me this thing that is a waste of money and it annoys me. So you actually lose it.

So I think that the hyper-personalization is important about just because you look back and you see that somebody did, you know, was part of something, you know, 20 years ago doesn't mean that it's relevant to them today. So I think there's this fine line of creativity. But I think I go back to what I talk about a lot, which is personalization is fantastic. But personalization without relevance is sometimes does more harm than good, right? Because like you'll see a lot of people right now doing prospecting where they'll find out, hey, John, I see you went to University of Maryland, but then they'll do this hard cut to this pitch that is so irrelevant to what I care about. It's like, dude, what's like, shut up.

And that's what I don't know if you've been paying a lot of attention to artificial intelligence, but that's what I am not afraid. Because about four or five years ago, I was freaked out with artificial intelligence because I was watching them write these emails that were better emails than I could write. They were more personalized than everything else. But the problem with it is they can make, they can grab something personal about you, but they can't connect it to the relevance. And I think what you said with what you're doing is, is you're just, you're the personalization and it, you don't have to be relevant if it is a genuine give, right? Like you, like I'll do that a lot with like awards and funding, for instance, you know, everybody always use funding to, hey, I saw you got a bunch of money.

Let me show you how to spend it, right? What I'll say is instead of that, I'll just say, hey, Michael, just saw you guys got some funding. Congrats. Hopefully that means something good for you personally and professionally. And that's it. And the odd thing about that, of me, that's kind of my replacement for touching base and checking in, right? So instead of me touching base and checking in with you, if you get an award, hey, Michael, congratulations on that award, man. Looks like things are going great for you. See you later. And oddly enough, that deposit of a give, a mini, mini give of just a recognition with no expectation that I'm going to get a response, I get more responses that way than saying, hey, Michael, congratulations on that funding.

I've got this great stuff that can help you take advantage of that. Let's talk. Right? So it's like this weird, like I cringe at people who are self-serving with their gives. And I, but it's such a, how do you find it in today's world with the demands on us for short-term results? I mean, so, so few people these days are willing to play the long game, right? That's why personal brand building, like I talk to people all the time about personal brand building. And I tell them, look, it's not like you're going to tweet something or share something and immediately get some business. It's a long-term play here. And it's a, and it's a, if you do it right, it'll eventually come back around to you, but not in probably this role that you're in right now, which is why so many kind of dip their toe in it, but they're like, I got to go drive results.

So how do you balance this, like this, this, this challenge of short-term results with, with the need for a long-term play here in this world that we're living in? Yeah, no, I mean, it's a, it's a never, it's a never ending problem. And, um, you know, the nature of sales obviously, you know, tends to be very, um, you know, very focused on short-term results. Yeah. What have you done for me lately? Right. Yeah. And, uh, you know, there are, there are some companies that, um, that have no sales quotas. It's an interesting concept. Um, and you know, the way the CEO, and they're probably one out of a thousand, right. Um, but that's the, that's the, right. The, the goal is to go and, and, and help the companies, um, get better at solving problems, bring new technologies into bear and help them achieve their, their results.

Right. And sometimes you're going to have a great quarter doing that. And sometimes you're not. Um, but you know, it's interesting is they pay, they pay their reps. They pay their reps based on the overall growth of the account and, and the satisfaction of the account and the ability of bringing in new use cases and so forth and so on. Um, but it's more on a kind of a multi-year kind of perspective. Um, but most companies don't have that philosophy, right. And it's number of dials and it's very formulaic and so forth. Um, and there's a lot of pressure on the reps to push the customers for, you know, to close. Now pushing them to close is, is good in some ways because it gets something done, um, and gets your product in there.

But, um, there is, there is a balance because if you think about an individual rep, they need to think about their own image, um, as, as a value, right. Above and beyond the company, right. They need to, they need to add value to their customers. They need to be a trusted resource and they can't be a lackey for terrible decisions or for bad products and so forth and so on. And, you know, so they need to, they need to think, Hey, whatever I do, it's not my company. It's me. Right. Um, and I need to do the right thing for my customers and, and find companies that kind of will have that, you know, will have that philosophy. Um, and, you know, and, and really understand that, you know, you push as hard as reasonably possible, but you're not going to alienate that customer by banging them over the head 20 times.

Um, like I've seen an enterprise sales where the CEO comes down, rips the salespeople apart. You guys are behind, everybody's going to be here 15 hours a day and we're going to bang, bang, bang. And what happens is they bring in another 12 K, um, but they've really damaged the Salesforce and they've damaged their enterprise customers. And they probably actually damaged deals with going to happen next quarter, so forth and so on. So when you're in an enterprise selling mode, you gotta, you gotta realize that you can't always force fit everything into quotas and, and timeframes. You know, you gotta be, you gotta be ready to sell when the customer's ready to sell by, um, but it's hard though. If the, if the incentive programs are aligned towards short-term, you know, activity and metrics, um, and, you know, if the, if the pressure comes down really heavy, the last four days of the quarter, you're going to, you know, you're going to, you know, you're going to get what you're going to create.

Right. Yeah. And that's what, that's the frustrating. Cause I think it's driven by, you know, IPOs is driven by VC funding. It's driven by, you know, PEs who are just, you know, go, go, go, go, go, go short-term. Let's get this going. When we all know that the long play, if you do it right is, is the better play. You get better customers. You have longer standing relationships. You have more revenue out of existing. Right. So it's, I wonder from your perspective, cause this is something I'm, I'm, I'm kind of, I don't want to say struggling with, but I'm, I'm, I'm wondering about, which is my thought is the better that our account-based marketing comes, right? More artificial intelligence, more, you know, the, the, the, the Amazon effect of I log in and I all, I see everything that I, the Facebook effect of every ad is so relevant to me because of what they know about me.

Right. So I think organizations are going to start to, and we're seeing it, they're starting to have more and more tools for intent, you know, intent data and account-based marketing and those types of things. And I almost feel like the, those ones that are out there doing it right are driving those inbounds and those inbounds should actually stop going to the, the kid who's on the bottom floor, right? The, the 22 year old wet behind the kid, a kid who's going to ask bank questions and it should go more to like a customer service person who understands the product. When somebody downloads a trial, instead of having a sales rep, call them up and say, Hey, what's up? I saw you down on the trial, it's having a customer service person call them and say, Hey, help, let me help you out.

Let me show you how to use this better. Right. And so I think that I see that happening. So I guess my question here is what does that do for the, when you said specific roles, right? The outbound role, the, the, the sales rep who's making the cold calls right now, is there a future for that in your perspective? And whether it's five years, 10 years, 20 years, I don't know, but is there a future for that straight? Like, you know, I dumped in, when I say cold call, I don't mean just ripping a list. I mean, like I, I, I see you as a prospect you haven't, you know, maybe I get some insights from account-based marketing about what you've done, but I'm cold calling you. You are not asking for my information.

I am straight up cold calling you. Is there a, do you think there's going to be a position for that in the future of sales? Yeah, no, it's, it's a great, it's a great point. And it certainly is the hardest role in sales by far. You know, and the most, the most rejection, the most hangups, I mean, at one level, you know, with, with nobody in offices now, right? So who you call, right? So, so there's a fundamental question is, you know, do you even have their cell phones? And in most cases, you won't. And if you call them on their cell phone, how pissed off are they going to be that you called them on their cell phone? You know what I mean? That's the other part of that. So there's an access thing.

And, and, you know, obviously that everybody's sitting in cubes and buildings is going to, is going to never return to what it was before. So, but even, even above and beyond that, you know, there, the use cases I could see that happening is where it really is a complex sale, a complex product. It really takes some discussion and it can't be, you know, you really have to have a conversation to talk about, you know, what, what are you experiencing now in relation to solving this problem? This is what we've been doing. What do you think, you know, kind of, if it does need that, that conversation, because, you know, the intense stuff works well, if I know what I'm going to buy and, and I have a fixed need and I'm out there shopping for it.

So that's great. But for a lot of new products and technologies, you know, they're not there yet, or they don't have the sophisticated marketing in place yet. The other case that works well is what I would call validation and market extension. So, so for one of my sales tech clients, they wanted to say, Hey, I want to go into traditional markets, but traditional markets are not as high tech. And we think our product might apply there, but it's very different than say SAS companies, right? So, so the salespeople don't really know those markets and their markets are really different. So, so I think some level of sales exploration or discovery type person that can really get in and have quality conversations with 10 or 12 buyers, not necessarily to sell them right off the bat, but to really understand them enough so that you can equip the salespeople to be more effective when they go, give them a playbook, give them knowledge, you know, and come up with some use cases of how the product might be implemented and sold in those spaces.

So, yeah, I mean, this is the classic one, you know, some people believe that, you know, the inbound marketing people, I call them the perfect marketers, right? They, they never want to have an outbound and they worry about their email getting spammed and so forth and so on. You know, there's a level of naivety in that, because if you think about it, you know, what percentage of the overall market would you say is in an average marketing database? What percent I give you, like if they were a million customers out there, individuals, what percentage of an average tech company, maybe 1%, right? So, so the inbound marketers, they're like, well, we're marketing to our database. And if we get an opt-in permission, we're going to do this.

The more wild marketers would go offshore, say, here's a hundred, here's a thousand prospects. I want five people for that. And they'd start to market out to them. So, so there's afraid, there's a sense of fear, both on the sales side, we don't want to reach someone that doesn't know us and we don't want to get rejected. But there's also the same fear on the marketing side that you can't reach out to anybody that hasn't opted in and put their hand up. But both of those strategies make your market very limited. In essence, you're only talking to those people that already have reached out to you, already put their hand up or already opted in. And that's 1% of the market. So if you go down the route of that, you limit yourself on growth.

But the marketing purists are, you know, they fear that, you know, something's going to happen. So they're going to be brought to the email court and they're going to lose everything. So I got this, I got this troll who's, who's been hitting me and for that exact reason, right? He hates me because all I do, because I talk about outbound prospecting and he's like, that's the worst, you know, you guys are the scum of the earth and, you know, blah, blah, blah. And I've had, and I've, you know, unfortunately engaged over, you know, and trolled, whatever, and said like, like, what is the difference? And I'd be curious on your answer because I don't want to ask this kid because this kid's a shithead.

But I want to, I'll ask you because you have a different perspective, which is what is the difference fundamentally, right? Because, because he was saying like, well, if they don't ask for it, right, then that's an interruption, right? Like that email, that cold call. And at first when I was younger, I was like, yeah, you're right. The phone's an interruption. But at the end of the day, it's not because you decided to pick up that phone. You saw that number in your phone. You knew there was no name attached to it. It was a random ass number. And you said, I'm going to take this. So it's not an interruption, in my opinion, you decided to open up that email and read it. Okay. So think about like, I look at marketing, because my background's marketing.

I grew up, you know, University of Maryland, I got my degree in marketing. Me driving, me going on Facebook, or going on your website and getting a pop up ad that I didn't ask for. Okay, and hitting X, what fundamentally is the difference between that and a cold call or an email that I sent you that you didn't ask for? Do you see a difference between those two things? Yeah, no, it's a similar, and you know, there is a little bit of an invasion. Like if you think about an email you didn't ask for is an invasion, a phone call is an invasion, or a pop up is an invasion. So when you're trying to, but the same way as you go through Las Vegas, right? Right. You know, yeah, and every sign on the, you know, along the road is an invasion.

When you go to the hotel, there's all kinds of stuff trying to invade your space. When you're on your cell phone, when you're, so the world of kind of, you know, I'm going to choose what I'm going to choose and so forth is kind of idealistic, right? And, you know, and how many times have we lifted the phone and found a vendor that somehow we do business with and was the greatest vendor we ever had and just reached out to us? I think what people do to avoid that is they try and get an introduction, right? So that, you know, and I think people say, well, maybe it's a cold call, but if I can get somebody that will maybe make an introduction or a reference or kind of a middle ground to give you some credibility, there's a way of kind of reducing that.

But I've been on, I've been on Zoom calls sometimes and I see something coming in and I think, oh, that's California. That may be my California client. And I pick it up and it's some SDR for something I didn't request. And I can get a little bit annoyed with that. However, they invariably get their product pitched and it's still in my ad, right? So they go, oh, I'm just calling about XYZ and I'll send you a follow-up email. And when I get that follow-up email, I'm like, oh, that was the person who called me on accident. Maybe I, maybe I glance at it. And that's, and that's where I believe. So I, I almost wish it would stop with account, but, you know, everybody comes up with an acronym of something that pretty much is just a new flavor of something just so they can sell it.

But, you know, instead of account-based marketing, it's account-based everything because it's not just marketing, right? I think sales reps should be taking a page out of marketing's book these days and realize that what you just said, this is an impression world. We leave impressions, right? It's a, it's a, it's a cold call, leaving a voicemail. That's an impression. A retweet on somebody's post, that's an impression. And if you can focus on all of those being positive impressions, so not just super annoying because you're in a cadence, in a 16-touch cadence because my boss told you to and you have no interest in what I have to say, that's annoying. And that's going to degrade your brand. But if you are thoughtful with, this is somebody who kind of looks like a duck, smells like a duck.

So I'm going to start to kind of learn a little bit more about you and email, call, send something in the mail, share a piece of content, retweet you, comment on the post. All those little things are putting little positive impressions in your brain so that if and when the time comes where you need or I do something that sparks that, huh, I need, you know what I mean? Let me, let me, why'd you ask that question? That's an extra interesting point. Now I'm the one that you come to. And again, I think that's where we're evolving. That's where the better sales reps are evolving to. The challenge is the short-term result aspect of it, which, you know, that multi-touch, you know, stuff. If you're brand new in your career, it's like any, I don't know if you work with financial service providers, right?

The ones that sell like life insurance and all that stuff. It's like the first three years of their career is just misery, right? Because they have to go to, well, and I don't even know how they're surviving in today's world, right? But like they used to have to go to every networking event, talk to every single person, ask every person for five referrals, right? And it's just this absolute wicked annoying, every one of them I talk to, I'm like, leave you alone. But guess what? I have a financial services provider that I met at a networking event and was referred to me as somebody else, right? And so like if they get through that, all of a sudden they get into this world of, all right, now I have my book of business.

I get referrals. I can lay off of that, right? So it's that sweet spot of the beginning phases of that new rep that I'm just worried about what happens from a company perspective and what they're pushing these kids on. Because what we saw in COVID was the results came, went down because everybody went home and everybody was freaking out. And unfortunately, I don't know if you saw this, a lot of executives doubled down and said more activity. You know what I mean? So instead of 50 dials a day, our pipeline's getting empty. We got to do 100 dials a day. And it was like, oh my God, that's the exact opposite of the way I think things should be moving, right? Right, right. No, it's true. I mean, I think that there's a tendency to think that sales and marketing is, I call it the revenue wheel.

And you just go in and you just turn the revenue wheel and it's all predictable and it's all a mechanic and you get it, right? And then all of a sudden sales goes down and in walks the guy and he's going this with the revenue wheel. But, you know, they think more activity is more, you know, this was the Staples thing, right? It was always a case of when you worked at Staples, if you followed their mantra of, you know, and it was very specific, right? In your first week, you do this. In your next week, you do that. And you should be at this level on the curve and if plus or minus 2%, right? So everything was regimented. So, you know, there were two types of people that would be like the people who would ignore all that and they go, I know how to sell and so forth and so on.

And if you hit your number, nobody would say boo. Right. But if you missed your number, you'd be in huge trouble. And then there would be the person that says, I'll just do exactly what they say. And if I don't sell anything, you know, and they'd come back and go, well, you're following the formula. So you have to be successful. So you're good, even if you sell nothing. Because, you know, they really believe that the formula is they're smarter than anybody. They have this unique formula. And I think a lot of companies do that. It's interesting on coaching. I saw the other day that something like 47% of sales reps would not pay a dollar for one hour of coaching with their boss. I'm actually surprised it's that low, to tell you the truth.

I would expect that to be like 80% of people, especially their frontline manager, right? Yeah, because they're not, you know, they're looking at dashboards all day and they're not thinking about what we talked about earlier on, which is how do we get meetings? How do we scale those activities to get meetings? How do we train people on ways to engage buyers, which is much more interesting to buyers? They don't think like that. They think in terms of activity, not in terms of, you know, breakout. Buyers can be, there are great ways of engaging buyers. And they never actually even talk to the top 1%. When I talked to another CMO in Boston, who's very well regarded and has paid about half a million dollars a year, I said to him, well, how do the sales reps in your company get meetings?

And he goes, that's a good question. I've never thought about that. And I'm like, wow. He has no idea. He goes, maybe I'll ask the salespeople. But so here's a critical piece of the pipeline. And he has no idea how they actually get the meetings. And, you know, so I think this is the one piece of the chain that's sub-optimized. It's the weakest link, right? Because you can't actually, you can't get to a proposal unless you have a meeting, right? In most cases, obviously enterprise level selling to anything else. But if that piece is fundamentally broken, then the whole thing is sub-optimized. So, yeah, so that's been my mantra is, you know, I saw the other day and I published, here are the 20 metrics that sales is tracking.

And none of those metrics said net new prospect meetings or net new customer meetings, which is where we're meeting with people and our customers that we don't know, right? So new people. So they're tracking everything and nothing. But the most important thing, they're not tracking at all, which continues to blow my mind. I was going to say, to me, that's the only matter, to me, that's literally the only number that matters. I mean, I've always had a formula, obviously, how many calls to get, how many meetings and all that stuff. And then where, you know, what channels do they come from? What are the conversion ratios? But at the end of the day, I always looked at qualified meetings per month.

That's the only metric I ever cared about. Now, did I ask my reps to make, you know, my form, what my formula was when I first started? It was $400 a week, got me eight meetings a month, got me four proposals, got me two pieces of closed business and average deals. So I knew that. And that was mine based on my just pure effort. And so I would have the reps, when they would start, do the 400 dials a week, right? Because I just needed, like, as a manager, the way I look at it is I need to know, like, if I need to know one of two things to be able to figure out how to help you. Effort, quality, and quantity, okay? So quantity is the easier one for me to cross off the list. Can you do the dial? Can you do the work, right?

Will you make the 400 dials? And if you make those 400 dials, Staples example, right? If you make those and you're not, I had the different philosophy of Staples. If you didn't make it, I didn't say you were successful. I said, okay, you did what I told you to do, but obviously it's not working. So now I can cross off the fact that the effort isn't there, or that the effort is there. Now let's work on quality. And then ultimately it got to a point where I didn't give a shit what your numbers were on the front end as long as you got those 10 meetings a month. Right. I mean, and you could get them through networking events. You could get them through partners. You could get them through referrals.

I didn't care because that was the number that mattered. And the fact that your research has shown that most people don't have a metric around that blows my mind. Yeah. Because if you don't have a metric, then you don't have a programmatic approach, right? So the thing is, if you measure MQLs, then you create programs to drive MQLs. Right. If you measure meetings, then you create programs to drive meetings. And, you know, and if you go to sales and marketing, by the way, this is the one metric that we're going to hold both of you accountable to. Like one of the things I often say to a VP of sales, because a lot of VPs of sales or VPs of marketing, they're all over the ABM methodology. And I think in general, it's a good methodology.

And I'll say to them, well, who are your top 20 prospects? And sometimes they can't really articulate that. Sometimes they can. If they're good, they go, here's our top 20 prospects. And then you say, okay, well, how many of them do you have meetings with in the next 30, 60, 90 days? And it's amazing. First off, they don't know. And secondly, they don't really want to know because maybe it's none. But if you're actually in an ABM methodology and you don't have visibility to how many meetings you have with your top 100 prospects, then what are we doing all this for? So, I think ABM is fundamentally flawed for that reason as well. But a good, you know, a good ABM driven VP of sales should be able to say, hey, our goal is to have 75% of our top 100 accounts we want to have meetings scheduled for in the next 60 days.

It could be second meeting, first meeting, third meeting. It doesn't matter. But if we're not getting meetings with these guys, we're not doing anything, right? And they don't have that. They don't have that at all. They don't even have a concept of that. And they run for the hills when I ask them about it because – and then they start looking through their calendar. I'm like, we're not talking about billions of accounts. I mean, you should know, right? Well, and I think that's – I mean, that trickles down to the individual rep. Like I always say, I believe every rep should have a list of top 25. These are the top 25 accounts that I'm going to be thoughtful. Now, I have to hit my volume with all my other ones, and I'm going to do what my job tells me to do.

But those 25, I'm going to actually, holy shit, do some research on. Maybe, you know, like figure out what's going on on LinkedIn and get strategic around bringing value to them and giving them something that is of massive value that I have no expectations of return on, right? And if you have that focus – I mean, Morgan on my team, he started doing something that I thought was really cool, which is 5x5, where every morning – because he does – he's using video these days. To get people in it, and it's working great for him. Oh, it's fine. Interesting. Yeah, well, for our audience, right? So we go after VPs of sales, CMOs – I'm sorry, VPs of sales, CROs, and VPs of enablement, and we're in the SaaS space, right?

So, right, it's not great for others, but video is really, really good for us. But what he does is he spends five minutes doing research and then does five minutes to put the video together for five a day. So that's literally – so 25 minutes, so it's about an hour. So for an hour, he picks five accounts, does one video per account, and it takes him about an hour. And if you just map that out, if you take your tier one accounts, five a day, for one hour a day, literally, right? So that's 25 a week, right? That's four weeks. That's 100 a month. That's – call it 1,000 a year. You skip a few weeks, right? So 1,000 a year. And if you apply a conversion ratio of, you know, 10%, 20% to that, and then you connect your ACV to that, like you hit your numbers just by doing that.

Yeah. Forget about all the other stuff. Yeah, no, I think video is a great idea and, you know, a highly personalized video. I mean, people will look at that. Yeah. That's interesting that you're getting such great results with that. LinkedIn video for us is bananas. Like a LinkedIn video where I can – if you and I are connected, one on LinkedIn, you can't do it on your laptop, but you can do it on your phone. So it's a strategy around connecting with you first and then going away and email, phone, whatever, and then coming back on LinkedIn and doing that personalized video. It can't be – usually video doesn't work on the first touch because it's weird to kind of be like, hey, what's up? But if you've warmed them up a little bit through some ABM-type stuff and then all of a sudden your fifth or sixth touch is this video being like, hey, Michael, man, I've been paying attention to what you've been doing online.

I'm really impressed. And I know you probably got a few things from me. The reason I wanted to talk to you is because of this. If you could get back to me, man, I'd appreciate it. Like a really genuine – Are these people you're first-degree connected with? Yeah. Are these people you're first-degree connected with? You have to be one connected to them. So that's why the strategy of following them first and then connecting in some way, shape, or form so that you are one connected and then letting them – like the last thing you want to do is connect with somebody and immediately pitch them, obviously. So you connect with them and then – Yeah, exactly. It happens to me all the time, too. But then letting that – I disconnect with them when they do that.

That's the first thing I do. Yeah, and then they start looking at your profile going, what happened? Because you can tell. They come back and look at your profile. Yeah, exactly. But that's great that you're doing that. I think that kind of personalization is powerful. And video in general is an incredibly powerful tool. Absolutely. Cool. Well, we're up on the hour here, Michael. So anything else that you wanted to hit on or any other things that you want people to think about before we talk about how they can get in touch with you? Yeah. Yeah, no, if people have programs that they think could be scaled in terms of net new prospect meeting programs, love to hear about, you know, what is it that folks – how folks are getting meetings and ideas of how folks could ramp that.

I'm happy to share more details on what I've seen and approaches that work, but love to hear from the audience as to what you think about this idea of a programmatic approach to ramping net new prospect meetings and getting best practices out on that. So I'd love to hear from folks on that. Love it. And where can people find out more information from you? Yeah, so my website's pretty easy to get to. It's GoToMarketPros, G-O-T-O-Market, M-A-R-K-E-T-P-R-O-S. And my email is Michael at GoToMarketPros. Perfect. And I think you do a prospect meeting assessment for people too, right? I do, yeah. So I'll go in and look at, you know, how are you driving net new prospect meetings now? What techniques are you using?

And I'll come back and give you a score on that. And I'll point out ones that you could adopt. And together we could pick a few programs which could work well for your company and your prospects. And we can design a ramp them for you. Awesome. Love it. Well, appreciate you coming on, Michael. I really enjoyed the conversation. And yeah, and like I said, hopefully everybody got some good nuggets out of this or at least got them to think a little bit. So I appreciate you coming on. Great. Well, thanks, John. Enjoy the conversation. And stay warm up there in Boston and go Brady, all right? Okay. Thanks a lot. All right, everybody. For all those listening, thank you all very much for listening as always.

And as I always say, go out there and make somebody smile today because even if you had a bad day, if you make somebody smile, you know, you had a good day. And we need a lot more of this in this world today, these days. So thank you all very much for listening and have a great one. Cheers. All right, guys. Michael had a lot to share with us today. And we're all pretty impressed with his knowledge and technique. It's pretty unique and different. Sometimes a shift in our perspective is all it takes for us to see the results that we're looking for and find that path to reach those goals that we've set through a new lens. Michael's lens is certainly fine-tuned, but his perspective being shared is what growth is all about.

Let's take all the notes we can and learn from Michael because his experience is extensive. Is Make It Happen Mondays part of your routine? Have you been listening to us for years? Well, this is your chance to take advantage of even more opportunity to grow alongside the JB Sales team. Members of JB Sales On Demand gain access to all of our training courses, certifications, webinars, live training sessions, templates, and much, much more. Join us at ondemand.jbarrows.com where you can learn new sales techniques that could set you aside from the competition. We'll see you next week with a new guest that's coming in to talk about how you can sell better. See you next week, everybody. See you next week, everybody.